dpb wrote:
J. Clarke wrote:
MB wrote:
On Nov 1, 3:54 pm, dpb wrote:
Thomas G. Marshall wrote:
Stephen M said something like:
VAX assembler & BLISS
Ah....a DEC old-timer.
Started with PDP-11/C. Vax was a major step up. BTW, I've moved on
to
unix and now to windoze and still maintain that vax/vms was a
great
OS
- close to crash proof. It still amazes me that after twenty
years,
windows is still lacking features present in vax/vms...

I'm curious as to what those features are.

"Nearly crash-proof" as a start... (In fact, I don't believe the
the VAX when I was using it ever had a fault/failure that was OS
related in the eight years I was there...one hardware failure that I
remember was the only non-scheduled downtime I remember ever.)

Most of the Windows crashes I've experienced since 2K shipped have
been hardware, usually RAM. System crashes still occur but they're
rare and when they do occur they're often driver crashes. One area of
confusion is that many "crashes" aren't really--the keyboard or
display driver is hung while the kernel is still up and running. On a
single-user machine with only the one keyboard and display it is
difficult to clear these other than by reboot (although briefly
pressing the power button may lead to an orderly shutdown--by briefly
I mean tap it, don't hold it to force a hardware shutdown), but the
same sort of problem on a server can often be corrected by logging in
from another terminal and killing the offending session.

Multi-user comes to mind...

Windows has been multiuser since 2K Server shipped. There's a Unix
client called "rdesktop". Prior to 2K Server Microsoft had a separate
product called "Terminal Services" that added the capability to NT.
The multiuser support is disabled on the single-user versions though
so you won't see it unless you have access to one of the server
products and the administrator has enabled the capability--by default
it's turned off.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)